


the entomologist

by mallowbug



Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types, New Dangan Ronpa V3: Everyone's New Semester of Killing
Genre: Backstory, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-11
Updated: 2020-12-12
Packaged: 2021-03-10 21:27:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,587
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28013910
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mallowbug/pseuds/mallowbug
Summary: This is years old but I'm posting it here anyway - just a character study of sorts where I put my interpretation of Gonta's backstory and in-game thoughts into words.
Kudos: 10





	1. I. Fabrication

He doesn't always like the way he's supposed to live: the stifling clothing, the trouble of remembering his manners, and the bore of indoor tasks. He's vocal about it at times, but he doesn't really need to be—his family can tell enough by the way he acts, always wasting time staring out of windows.

He'll grow out of it, they think. There's still plenty of time for that.

A caregiver straightens up from fussing over his appearance, wondering why she bothers when he's only going to get dirty, and sends him off with an encouraging pat on the back. She watches with passing concern as he goes, as slow as his impatience will allow him to be ( _no running indoors, please_ ), a friendless boy swallowed up that day by the world he liked much better.

\--

Time eludes him out here—it always does.

Hours are spent catching insects for the sake of observation, one-sided conversation, and, sometimes, showing off. He finds himself thinking _maybe they'll like_ THIS _bug_ with each new catch, but his family's attitude, as with the other children he's met, seems to stay resolute.

At the mouth of a forest he's yet to fully see, he dwells on a smokybrown cockroach settled peacefully on his hand: _Everybody thinks bugs are scary and weird, huh?_

It stays in place, antennae wavering, and he smiles: _Gonta gets that too._

Home is farther behind than he realizes, and his focus leads him further in.

\--

He doesn't come back out that night, nor the next night, nor the one after that— until they blend together and all he knows is the gnawing pain of hunger; the alternating pulls of fear and quietude on his mind.

He sees something far off and pursues it until he thinks he can't anymore, collapsing at the outskirts of something he's at the right age to believe exists.

There's a family of its own here; a civilization deep in Japan's forests that no one is meant to know about. From within, things that aren't quite human see him too—they see his eyes, red and puffy, looking up at them and then giving out.

They take him in.

\--

Time eludes him here most of all. Days become weeks, weeks become months, and months become ten years.

He comes to appreciate the natural world more than he'd have ever thought possible, and one of the biggest things he learns down the line is how to feel indebted to others. His forest family, as he calls them, raises him from that first day forward, indulging him in the interests he never thought he'd get to share. For these reasons, he can't bring himself to leave. The thought of trying frightens him, anyway. He doesn't know where home is anymore.

Still, he thinks of his true family often—during winters most of all. Although he stops being able to tell which months or days he's in, he knows every span of snowfall means Christmas and the New Year and, not long afterward, his own birthday. He hopes each time that they're as happy and at peace at home as he is here, despite their being apart.

As long as that's the case (and it's only a thought, really, supported by such an optimistic mind), he doesn't mind that they haven't found him yet.

Surely they must go looking, from time to time.

Surely they don't just think he's dead.

\--

For a while, his only encounters with other people were brief and few and far between. He was never rescued but left behind, as if that forest were where he was meant to be, now an adolescent boy with wild hair and a nonage unalike everyone else his age.

He's too disorderly now. Too untidy, too—

— _brutish_ , they say, not holding their tongues. He'll never uphold the family name like that.

The height of his return falls there.

His true family hates what they hear of his forest family, but he loves both sides too much to let it be. Any memories preceding the day he got lost aren't as bright, but he knows the hopes everyone had for him; how they expected him to fit the proper mold and how he never did.

It seems an easy enough thing to make up for. He makes a goal of it, considering it a way to reassure one family while repaying his debt to the other—it's for them more than it is for himself, but he would never mind it.


	2. II. Fiction

He has to thank Akamatsu and Saihara for speaking to him.

He expects to be left alone at first, intimidating as he looks, reflecting childhood with his body bent and his eyes trained on the ground—the lack of insects here so far is discouraging, but he won't give up on them yet. In any case, the company of other people lifts him up again.

Akamatsu is especially spirited, grasping hope where the rest of them might hesitate. He tries his best to follow suit—after the first mere suggestion of friendship, after everyone's attempts to escape through the underground tunnel, after her execution most of all.

In a killing game like this, he dismisses himself as someone too ignorant to understand it all, but he'd like to do what he can to help them.

It's too optimistic a view, in the end, but to escape and stay friends with one another is much greater a wish to honor.

\--

As the strongest (—brutish, _they say_ ) of the group, he appoints himself to be their protector—it is for this reason, he decides, that he got to be so big. The others use it to accuse him in the first class trial, but they're easy to forgive; the truth is an imperative thing to find, and he's sure he understands that.

He never stops thinking about how he can make himself useful, fretting over the safeguard of the academy grounds and everything that a gentleman should and shouldn't be doing. Fighting Monokuma and the Exisals turns out ineffective, but—there _has_ to be a way to save them all.

Offering to die in place of dear Toujou doesn't do it, either, and she still isn't the last to go. Angie and Chabashira, Hoshi and Amami before them... He can't help blaming himself for their deaths, each of which worsens the weight on his shoulders (and he's the only one letting it build up).

He believes Ouma when he tells him that nothing good comes out of his attempts to help. He apologizes, as humbly and easily as each of his apologies before.

Momota scolds him for it and he's sorry for that, too, but he holds it in.

(Something—there has to be something to save the rest of them.)

\--

(Sometimes, comfort is found in small doses.

In the stars, for one—they're different here and they won't fix everything that has happened so far, but they're still nice to look at, aren't they?

In his research lab—his bug friends aren't as absent from the academy as he'd initially thought, and in there there are even more about to hatch.

In the thought of family—though he can't tell how much progress he's made in becoming a gentleman for them, he still would like to see them again.

And—in the fact that no one's given up yet, too. They all have something waiting for them out there beyond the dome, and he likes to think their promise to end the killing game and leave together can't be broken.)

\--

By the time the fourth one came around, he did think he was getting better at class trials.

They get harder to believe as friendships grow and as numbers dwindle, but the necessity remains the same.

The Neo World Program sounds too foreign, though, like an experience the others all had without him. He's told that if he doesn't understand, he shouldn't say anything—yet as much as he'd like to obey Harukawa, he'd hate his own silence more.

He follows as well as he had in prior trials, the difference being that it all dwindles down to a confession from Ouma, who seems to have known all along: _the culprit is Gonta._

(He'll say it again—and again—and for a while, they'll all fight it.

But as with any trial, desperation wanes to a point of bleak acceptance, and Gonta can't fight Saihara's ability.)

He cries hard through the picture Saihara paints of a scene he doesn't remember; through the image he does remember of Iruma dead in her chair, strangled, her face twisted up in agony. How could he—? He wanted to believe in himself—in his self-assigned role as everyone's protector and in the fact that he would never do anything to hurt them.

But he trusts in them and the truth that they all reach.

\--

His Alter Ego tells him why he did it, and he takes full responsibility. It was his own decision—his own mistake and failure.

He's hard on himself, apologizing to everyone for his trouble, to himself for never fulfilling his promises to his families, and to Iruma for a death she didn't deserve, but he can't be hard on them.

He still has hopes—hopes that they'll forgive one another and keep being friends (and that includes Ouma, who he hates to see cry).

He accepts his execution as the last thing he can do for them, exchanging fear for a reassuring farewell: _Gonta loves you all._


End file.
